Gleanings: Articles on Other Sites

In his Guardian Unlimited blog, author Sam Jordison writes,

I’ve recently been indulging in the literary equivalent of schadenfreude. Not so much pleasure in someone else’s misfortune, as pleasure in everyone else’s lack of knowledge.

It’s not an admirable emotion, I know. Even so, I can’t help it. I’ve just started reading one of the finest writers I’ve encountered for a long time — and my enjoyment is only heightened by the certainty that very few others in the UK have even heard of him, let alone shared the delights of his superb prose.

We fans of neglected books must admit, like Jordison, that a certain amount of the pleasure in discovering them is the knowledge that we’re among the lucky few to have made the discoveries. In this case, the discovery was the works of the writer, Alfred Chester:

They are strange contradictory books. Marked out by Chester’s superb prose, they’re both surreal and unflinchingly true to life, at once light, witty and imbued with heavy existential angst. They deal with everything and nothing. They are sometimes brutal and hilariously waspish, but always humane. Essentially, for all their 1950s existentialism, they are unlike anything else. As Chester himself said in description of The Exquisite Corpse: “… it is probably the most unlike book you have read since childhood. And probably also, the most delicious.”

As one of his commenters points out to Jordison, Chester’s works might be rare in the U.K., but thanks to the efforts of the Black Sparrow Books, long a supporter of such neglected writers as John Sanford and Ed Dorn, three of his books are currently in print, and a fourth is due for reissue later this year:

• Head of a Sad Angel, a collection of short stories written in the 1950s and 1960s
• Looking for Genet: Literary Essays and Reviews
• The Exquisite Corpse, selected as one of the 100 best lesbian and gay novels
• Jamie is My Heart’s Desire, “a surreal, homoerotic phantasmagoria”

Jordison invites his readers to suggest an “unsung genius” of their own, and among the names proposed in response are:

• M. R. James, a Victorian writer of ghost stories whose works are readily available in collections from Penguin and Oxford World Classics.
• Delano Ames, who wrote dozens of mysteries between 1932 and 1972, including a series featuring Dagobert and Jane Brown “full of arch conversation and bizarre wealthy characters.”
• James Hanley, an Irish novelist whose 1985 Times obituary was headlined “Neglected Genius of the Novel”. Hanley’s books are out of print in the U.S. but he had at least the honor of his own tribute website (now in archive). You can pick up a copy of A Dream Journey, one of his late and most highly-praised novels, for as little as $0.03 on Amazon. What are you waiting for?

And one of the commenters is even kind enough to mention the Neglected Books page. Thanks!

Source: “‘Woman Within’: An Unlikely Rebel of the Privileged South,” Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post, 29 November 2003, available online at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A20195-2003Nov28.html

Reading through the individual articles in Washington Post Book Editor Jonathan Yardley’s excellent series on neglected and revisited classics, Second Readings, I came across the following quote worth highlighting here:

The court of literary opinion is no more fair or just than the court of public opinion. Writers of limited gifts and accomplishments (Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, John Steinbeck) are overpraised and over-rewarded, while others of great gifts and singular accomplishments (William Humphrey, Dawn Powell, Jerome Charyn) are ignored or misunderstood. This of course is true in other endeavors, but somehow it seems especially unjust that writing, the best of which is supposed to stand the ages, so often produces such small recognition for those who do it so well.

My own list of unjustly overlooked and underrated writers is long; it includes, in addition to those mentioned above, John P. Marquand, Thomas Savage, Roxana Robinson, Harold Frederic, Elizabeth Spencer, John Oliver Killens and, at or very near the top, Ellen Glasgow.

A few expository notes on these writers:

• Marquand is one of the more oft-mentioned underrated writers, and his works appear on a number of lists on this site. In fact, I’ve been toying with the idea of devoting a separate website to his works.
• A New York Times reviewer once wrote of Thomas Savage: “The best-seller lists make it clear that American readers are powerfully fond of the familiar and the accessible — and if there were justice (or better taste) in the literary marketplace, surely one or another of Thomas Savage’s dozen novels would have been topping those lists for the past 30-odd years.” His 1967 novel, The Power of the Dog, was included in Roger Sale’s “Neglected Recent American Novels” article in The American Scholar. Unfortunately for Savage, he’s taken as his subject the American West, which has often been a kiss of death for critical recognition and sales. Annie Proulx, whose “Brokeback Mountain” avoided the same fate, wrote the introduction to the 2001 Bay Back Books reissue of The Power of the Dog. Even readers who got to the point of picking up the book, though, had to get past this opening sentence:
  

  Phil always did the castrating; first he sliced off the cup of the scrotum and tossed it aside; next he forced down first one and then the other testicle, slit the rainbow membrane that enclosed it, tore it out, and tossed it into the fire where the branding irons glowed.

• Roxana Robinson is a biographer, novelist, and short story writer. The youngster of this group, illustrated by the fact that she’s got her own website and domain name.
• Harold Frederic was a contemporary of Twain and Howells. The texts of three of his novels — The Damnation of Theron Ware, In the Valley, and The Market-Place, can be found at Project Gutenberg.
• Elizabeth Spencer is known for her novella, Light in the Piazza, but her critical reputation is best reflected in her extensive oeuvre of short stories. And it turns out she also has her own website.
• John Oliver Killens was twice nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Of his 1963 novel, And Then We Heard the Thunder, Yardley once wrote that it was “one of the few distinguished novels about World War II.”
• Ellen Glasgow’s recognition improved, along with that of a number of other women writers such as Kate Chopin, when the eddies of the feminist waves hit the academic and publishing worlds, and all her major works are back in print. Yardley’s article moved me to order a copy of A Woman Within.

Source: http://magnificentoctopus.blogspot.com/2006/07/great-underappreciated-authors-updated.html

As part of her literary blog, A Box of Books, Ella asked a number of fellow bookfiends a series of questions about their reading and writing experiences. One of these questions was,

Who’s your favorite underappreciated author, and what makes them great?

Blogger Isabella Kratynski compiled a list of the various responses at her Magnificent Octopus site. Among the names mentioned are the well-known — but perhaps underappreciated (Rebecca West, Mary McCarthy), and the obscure (MeÅ¡a Selimović, Adele Wiseman).

Source: http://syntaxofthings.typepad.com/underrated_writers/

Bloggers Jeff Bryant and Trevor Jackson asked other literary bloggers nominate contemporary writers “who aren’t receiving the attention they should.” Each blogger was asked submit up to five names. The complete list, compiled at the link above, includes 55 different writers. Remarkably, very few of the nominations overlapped. The result is a diverse survey of some of today’s neglected writers and their best works.

Source: Lost Classics Submissions

As part of its publicity for the first release of Lost Classics in 2001, Random House Canada ran a contest in which readers were invited to submit their own suggested lost classics. Over eighty readers participated. Carol Ann Westbrook won with her nomination of Pamela Brown’s A Swish of the Curtain, a tale about a group of young English children create their own theatre. “I took this book out of the library so often that when it was completely worn out, the librarian gave it to me,” she writes. Other suggestions include Henry Kriesel’s novel, The Rich Man, which I notice Red Deer Press plans to reissue in September 2006, and Joseph Kinsey Howard’s history of the Métis people of Canada and Louis Riel’s attempts to found an independent nation inside Canada.

Source: www.barnesandnoble.com/writers/writerdetails.asp?cid=1425883

True to form, this prolific and idiosyncratic author includes a few virtually unknown titles, such as Manes Sperber’s trilogy Like a Tear in the Ocean and Micheline Marcom’s The Daydreaming Boy

Source: http://www.kcrw.com/etc/programs/bw/bw020214susan_sontag

From the great Santa Monica public radio station, KCRW, sound files from the “Bookworm” show of Thursday, 14 February 2002. The late critic and novelist Susan Sontag talks about the discovery of lost and forgotten masterpieces, in particular, on Summer in Baden Baden by Leonid Tsypkin (New Directions) about an odd vacation in the life of Fyodor Dostoevski. She also discusses Artemisia by Anna Banti (University of Nebraska Press); Fateless by Imre Kertesz (Northwestern University Press); and A Book of Memories by Peter Nadas (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

“Lost Classics: In a culture where people barely read, it would be an exaggeration to say that writers are overrated. Still, some writers get more credit than they deserve, most get less.”
by Alan Bisbort
Source:The Hartford Advocate, 15 April 2004

“For whatever reasons, many great writers like Gissing have largely been lost to us today. Most are ‘known’ in the sense that they occasionally show up on a syllabus. And yet, most people who consider themselves ‘cultured’ will go through life unbothered by the fact that they’ve never read anything by Ivan Turgenev, Emile Zola, Willa Cather, George Eliot, Nathaniel West (Day of the Locusts should be required reading), Stephen Crane (he wrote more than Red Badge of Courage ), Theodore Dreiser (read Jennie Gerhardt and weep), James Baldwin (rage keeps him timeless), Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road , set in Connecticut, is Cheever with a knockout punch), V.S. Pritchett (the best modern essayist on literature), Dwight Macdonald ( In the American Grain is one of the great works of criticism), Randall Jarrell (for his essays, like “Sad Heart at the Supermarket”), Joseph Mitchell ( Joe Gould’s Secret is a nonfiction Great Gatsby ), A.J. Liebling (food, wars, con men … what more could you want?), and Robert Graves (known for his Claudius novels, but Good-Bye to All That is among the great war memoirs).”

Bisboort goes on to write, “The following books and authors are those I’ve been most guilty over the years of obsessing over, purchasing extra copies for friends, on whom I force them”:

Jernigan, by David Gates

“… Gates’ Jernigan is one of the most fully realized ‘anti-heroes’ (remember them?) ever captured between covers. His life falling apart, his relationship with his son unraveling, Jernigan drives north into a New England winter. It’s the strangest pilgrimage since Kerouac…”

Cell 2455 Death Row, Caryl Chessman

“In the 12 years between his sentencing and his execution, Chessman lived and tirelessly labored on Death Row at San Quentin Prison, shaping one of the most remarkable bodies of work in American legal history…. Chessman was not just a good writer; he was a good thinker whose clarity of mind and ability to bring his thoughts directly to the page….”

Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler

“A masterful polemic disguised as a novel, whose theme was never more pertinent than now, with much of the world emulating the control tactics of the Soviet state that Koestler so intimately knew.”

Journey to Nowhere, Shiva Naipaul

“As a writer, Shiva was the equal of his Nobel Prize-winning older brother, V.S. In this riveting book, Shiva probes the Jim Jones “Guyana tragedy,” sparing no one, widening the target to include California consciousness-raising. He does it with a withering humor that is just this side of suppressed rage….”

Editor’s note

Carroll and Graf recently announced that it was reissuing Cell 2455 Death Row in Fall 2006, with a new introduction by Joseph Longseth.

Moorish Girl’s Unappreciated Books Archive

Since late 2004, Laila Lalami, author of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, has been “asking readers, writers, editors, critics, librarians, or booksellers to weigh in on a book they loved, but which has remained underappreciated.” Almost every week, contributors ranging from veteran best-sellers (Scott Turow) to simple reading enthusiasts recommend and comment upon one of their favorite neglected books.

Source: “The lost boys (and girls),” Tom Boncza-Tomaszewski, The Independent, 14 November 2004

“It’s a dismal afternoon and I’ve ended up searching for lost authors on the internet: writers who once had flourishing careers, but who now face extinction. Like many things that occur online, it’s a kind of sordid game, depressing even; but it’s addictive. I type an author’s name into a search field: Marlowe, Gabriel. He cropped up in a memoir I was reading; a mysterious figure who had a critical and commercial success in the mid-1930s with his first novel, I Am Your Brother, a tale of someone who finds he may have a brother hidden in the attic above his studio, fed offal and fairy stories once a day by their mother. I like the sound of it, and but I’m primarily interested in how many copies of it still exist: how much Marlowe there is left in the world.” At the end of the artice, Boncza-Tomaszewski selects his own “Five Forgotten Gems”: Thru (1975), by Christine Brooke-Rose; The Woman With the Flying Head and Other Stories (1997), by Yumiko Kurahashi; Crisis Cottage (1956), by Geoffrey Willans; L’Ecume des Jours (Froth on The Daydream) (1947), by Boris Vian; and The Life of Cardinal Polatuo (1965), by Stefan Themerson.

from Maud Newton’s Blog, out-of-print expert Robert Nedelkoff nominates three American novelists for rediscovery:

“What I’d like to do here is to present to any interested editors (at major houses, or at small presses with the kind of resources that would be needed) three American authors, whose oeuvres are extensive, and entirely out-of-print — writers whose work deserves the kind of treatment that Dawn Powell received at Steerforth or Stanley Elkin received at Dalkey Archive.”

His nominees:

Peter De Vries:

“De Vries … invariably hailed as ‘America’s foremost comic novelist.’ A writer whom Robertson Davies, in the Seventies and Eighties, repeatedly called the best American novelist, period. A writer praised by Kingsley and Martin Amis, Christopher Buckley, Julian Barnes, Thurber, Paul Theroux . . . the list could go on for centuries.” [Ed. Note: The University of Chicago Press reissued De Vries’ The Blood of the Lamb and Slouching Towards Kalamazoo in 2005.

Vance Bourjaily

“His first novel, The End Of My Life, was very nearly the last book edited by Max Perkins — and Bourjaily, to my knowledge, is the last living writer who worked with Perkins. (And, speaking of another of Perkins’ writers, Hemingway, in a conversation with Leslie Fiedler in 1960, singled out Bourjaily as the best writer of his generation….)”

Jerome Weidman

“Not long before he died, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote (it’s in his published letters) that Weidman was worth fifty or a hundred Steinbecks (forget which it was). Later in the Forties, Hemingway said in a letter that Weidman, in his first books, certainly proved he could write. Rebecca West liked him too.”